Obtaining optimum operation of CO₂ absorption plants

In this work a general optimization package is developed for CO2SIM. Three different methods of solving a specified case study have been tested. It gives a procedure which can be used for rapidly finding optimum operation conditions for a regeneration system in a CO₂ removal plant. The procedure is exemplified for a CO₂ absorption plant. The optimization procedure has been added as a new feature to the CO2SIM simulation software. To be able to examine the optimization module in a system perspective, campaign data from a pilot rig absorption/desorption unit has been used for initial comparison and validation. Thereafter the optimization tool was used to find out if the given case could be run in a more energy efficient manner.
It was found that finding optimums by “auto simulation of a matrix structure” was the most robust method.